3rd November – 26th November 2021
Opening: 3rd of November from 6 to 9pm in the presence of the artist
How do we see the cityscape and its periphery? Can we read these as a composition of volumes pasted over with brand labels and messages? What does our urban public space tell us? The appearance of our cities is a mirror image of the state of our culture. People read and interpret the city based on a form of text written by the private sector and the state – we as citizens witness a strong commercialization of space that favors consumers over residents and control that prefers prediction over natural order of things. All these are a long-term interest of artist Markéta Kinterová. Based on her work with photography and material of posters she tries to uncover various layers of the issue.
The author in the present artist book “What You See Is What You Think” discusses the dystopia of post-capitalism by means of experiments with the book, the billboard format and the selection of images. The reproduction of the billboard book serves as a platform that refutes some rules of the traditional concept of reading of a book with pictures. It is also a form of annexes with text that responds to visual strategies deployed in public space with the intention to consolidate and entrench a repressive system of control, turning citizens into consumers.
Markéta Kinterová (*1981) focuses on conceptual photography, oftentimes overlapping into public space. She studied photography at the Faculty of Art and Design at the Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Czech Republic. The author’s book “What You See Is What You Think” was published as the artistic part of the doctoral thesis under the title “Oppositional Reading of Public Space”, which she defended at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in 2019.
She has taken part in several independent and group exhibitions in institutions as Meet Factory, Prague, Czech Republic, Museum auf Abruf – MUSA, Wien, Austria, Month of Photography Festival, Krakow, Poland, Fotobiennale, Moscow, Russia and many others. She is the editor-in-chief of the Fotograf magazine and the executive director of the Fotograf Gallery and Fotograf Festival in Prague.
Photo: Zsuzsanna Simon